Building and playing with models online in a virtual world is becoming increasingly popular among various users. Internet-based virtual worlds are simulated, enabling users to travel within a virtual world, play games within the virtual world, and interact with other inhabitants (i.e., other users) of the virtual world. A virtual world is defined by a topology of spatial relationships between connected or adjacent places of the virtual worlds. The topology defines the way in which geographic regions/places are connected or otherwise linked together in a particular virtual world.
Typical virtual world topologies provide for contiguous landscapes of connected places. In terms of a map of the United States, California is connected to Nevada which in turn is connected to Utah, etc. The states, or places, bordering one another are physically connected and thus define the contiguous landscape of the United States. As in real life, there is only one copy of each place in a virtual world, no matter how many users are in the place. As such overcrowding of popular places may lead to the exclusion of users from the place until space is available, or the place may become difficult to navigate within. For example, in a flat, contiguous virtual world environment such as SECOND LIFE™, there is a limit to the number of players that can occupy a specific quadrant or acre of land. When the limit is reached, no additional players are allowed access to that quadrant and thus are not allowed to visit popular places. Furthermore, much of the virtual world environment is left empty.
Other virtual worlds address the issue of crowding in popular places by distributing contiguous virtual world topologies among multiple computer servers. Thus, each server provides for a copy of the same contiguous virtual world. However, virtual worlds may only be populated by a few users creating empty user experiences. Furthermore, dedicating computing and network resources to unpopulated virtual worlds is inefficient.